All posts tagged virus

Scientists and regulators investigating the mysterious spread of a deadly virus plaguing the U.S. pork industry are stepping up their scrutiny of what the nation’s hog herd eats.

With a dearth of solid leads, investigators are exploring whether something in pig feed could be a conduit for porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, which has spread to 27 states and killed millions of young pigs since it was first identified in the U.S. last April. One focus of the inquiry: porcine plasma, a widely used feed ingredient made from the blood of slaughtered hogs and fed to piglets.

People under the age of 25 might not remember is so well, but there was a time long ago when the computing world was clouded by an ever-present virus threat. Back before MacBooks became the default laptop, in a simpler, more dangerous time when Microsoft Internet Explorer was the dominant web browser, the internet was a scary place. A couple of wrong clicks could render your computer a war zone of malicious code.

Much of that has changed: web browsers have got a lot safer and Apple’s operating system, always relatively immune to virus issues, became more commonplace. So did smartphones and tablets, which have yet to be hit by big-time virus problems.

That last bit is changing, according to Lookout, a mobile security company. In particular, Google’s Android operating system is vulnerable to malicious programs, thanks to a combination of a lightly-policed app store and an operating system that gives installed applications a large amount of leeway to mess with the underlying system of the phone.

Lookout recently discovered BadNews, a piece of malicious code, or malware, that it says is “a significant development in the evolution of mobile malware.” Running inside dozens of applications being distributed through the Google Play app store, it may have made its way onto at least two million mobiles, and potentially up to nine million.